A sesquicentennial celebration of the most suggestive circumcision in history
presented by The New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Dorot Jewish Division
click here to see the much-discussed poster
7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m., Wednesday May 10, 2006
South Court Auditorium, Humanities and Social Sciences Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
THE JOY GOTTESMAN UNGERLEIDER LECTURE this year takes the form of four short presentations and a conversation at the intersection of Jewish identity, psychoanalysis, and minor surgery.
"There are many reasons for conferences, but the 150th anniversary of Freud's bris is the most novel I've come across yet."
--John Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History, University of California, Berkeley
Circumcision in Freud’s Context: The State of the Art, 1856-1939
Circumcision—its meaning and value—was a matter for fierce and widespread debate, among Jews and others, in late-19th and early 20th century, in Central Europe especially. What were the issues and why did circumcision become the ritual around which discussions about the nature of Jewish identity revolved?
ROBIN JUDD is Assistant Professor of History at The Ohio State University. Her book, Cutting Identities: Jewish Rituals and German Politics, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.
Psychoanalyzing Phallacies: Freud and Current Circumcision Controversies
This Freudian perspective, focusing on circumcision as symbolic of social, erotic, and cultural loss, uses Freud to analyze those who use Freud to critique the procedure.
ERIC KLINE SILVERMAN is Edward Myers Dolan Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Jewish Studies at DePauw University. His first book, Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea, was published in 2001, and his next, From Abraham to American: A History of Jewish Circumcision, is due out in June.
Little Hans: A Footnote in the History of Circumcision
In an aside in his case history of “Little Hans,” Freud locates the root of antisemitism in an unconscious dread of the sight of the circumcised penis—symbol par excellence of the castration complex. How does this startling claim relate to the rest of Freud’s oeuvre and to his contemporaries’ assessments of the ethnic, sexual, and gender identities of Jews?
JAY GELLER is Senior Lecturer in Modern Jewish Culture in the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. His book, Mitigating Circumcisions: Judentum and the Construction of Freud's Corpus, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.
Circumcised Supremacy: Freud’s Final Cut
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud finds in this “holy mark” in the flesh the key to the peculiar Jewish identification with the incorporeal realms of the mind and spirit.
ELIZA SLAVET is a member of the Interdisciplinary Faculty at New York University’s Gallatin School, and a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation, Freud’s Moses: Memory Material and Immaterial, focuses on Freud’s controversial belief in the biological inheritance of memory and his formulation of a “theory of Jewishness.”